A Moral Issue

I will be busy for a spell and unable to comment here, so I want to add this pre-Iraq War statement as something that has become a serious moral issue for me. The speaker made the declaration in 20-2002 just prior to Iraq invasion. Read the statement in that light and don't read more than is there, although hindsight tells me the speaker hit dead center on what has for me become a burning issue over the past twenty years. It tells me this person had an integrity that the current administration lacked, insight and integrity that I like, altho I've not decided who I will vote for as president.

“You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells. You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil through an energy policy that doesn’t simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil. Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willing join. ‘The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed,. Poverty and despair

. . . I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors, in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.”

I'll be back soon, but I have to go just now and help someone I care much about................Wayne (my source for the quote is below)

Federal Plaza, Chicago, October 26, 2002
“Barak Obama The Improbable Quest
John K Wilson
Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, 2008
pp 43-2-43